Easter Weekend Reading List

Photo by Emily

God is good: God doesn’t save from God, God saves us from ourselves.

God is love: theology’s purpose is to increase our awareness and move us towards love.

God is sacrificial: purpose is found in serving others, not accumulating power.

God is mystery: what we know can be inscribed on a tiny grain of rice, sitting in a bowl, in a house, on a planet, floating through the vast universe

We enter Easter weekend with all its religious pageantry: marshmallow bunnies, chocolate crosses, dour Friday liturgies and triumphant Sunday services. It’s a confusing time.

Some incredible theological gymnastics will be performed this weekend. It will be quite a show. And for many of you the show feels irrelevant, and you are correct, much of it is irrelevant. With all the confusing traditions and ideologies, we need reminders of simple truths. These three books do a great job of describing what the Christian life is all about:

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look and Listen to Life – by Frederick Beuchner

I really enjoy Beuchner’s humorous and down-to-earth style of writing. A few of his other books (The Sacred Journey and Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale) are also among my favorites. In this book he talks about how to recognize the movements of God in the seemingly mundane events of our lives. The past two years I am in a new stage of life: I starting pastoring a church and also have two small children. There are many moments that are unspectacular: cleaning up poop, washing dishes, consoling crying children, fixing broken appliances. (And these are just at the church, I haven’t even mentioned my kids yet). Beuchner’s work helped me to change my view of life’s small moments. How the dishes I’m washing are actually the feet of Jesus and the promises of God are stamped onto the new boiler we purchased for the church building.

Compassion – by Henri Nouwen

I read Compassion about ten years ago while working at a psychiatric hospital in China as a counseling resident. In general, I was inspired by Nouwen’s story – leaving the life of a Yale professor to go live at the Le Arche community in Toronto, a home for adults with disabilities. He describes his shock in going from an Ivy league environment to helping people dress themselves in the morning or eat at mealtimes. This book is an outcropping of his experiences in that community. He gives one of the best definitions of the word compassion I’ve ever read - “…rather than reaching down to pull people up, it is going and living among people in pain.”

To me, the Christian life is a life of ‘cum pati’ (suffering with others), that is, compassion. We are not called to convince others with our dazzling theological arguments, or convert them to our way of life through superior morality. Rather we show the love of a suffering and broken Christ to a world deeply in need of compassion.

The Cross and The Lynching Tree – by James H. Cone

This is a book written by theologian James Cone, drawing our attention to the violence of the cross and how the cross continues to manifest in our world today. Cone’s book focuses on American history, especially as it pertains to violence against black Americans and lynching. For me, this book was paradigm shifting in how I saw the crucifixion. Rather than an emotionally removed theological event, Christ’s death became much more visceral and disturbing. By extension, this book highlights the connection between the cross and our society’s numbness and pathological addiction to violence, especially in the context of American culture.